When Patrick Kander was 15, a year into his dishwashing job at Perkins, his manager took a leap and asked if he wanted to try his hand at cooking, and he’s never looked back.
Now, Kander, the executive chef of Bon Appétit at Hillsdale College, develops meals for the café, observes, and coaches the Grewcock Student Union staff, but also sets catering menus and teaches cooking classes on the side.
“This is the hardest business to be successful at,” Kander said. “The failure rate is extremely high because you’re dealing with food.”
His long career in the food business means he knows its parts inside-out and start-to-finish.
“One of the greatest things about cooking food is being able to take it from off the truck, out of the cooler, into preparation, into the cooking technique, and onto the plate and serving it,” Kander said.
Kander’s mum was Irish, so he joked that she knew how to boil when she married his Hungarian father. For three years, Kander’s mom learned from her mother-in-law. The family of nine — Kander, the youngest of seven siblings — ate every day at 5:30 as a family, and tended a garden.
He grew up on comfort food, from chicken and biscuits to stews, anything slow-cooked made for winter. He appreciated the time it took to make food from scratch, a value that he holds to this day. His mother, who shopped at local markets, instilled in him his values for home-cooked meals using fresh, local ingredients, as well as his aversion to grocery stores.
He cooked at Perkins for until high school graduation, making $3.35 an hour, but loving every minute of it. While studying business management at Cleveland State, he worked at two different restaurants, but in the back of his mind, he knew he wanted to go to culinary school in New York.
The plunge into life in the City after living in Cleveland didn’t make him homesick, but it was intimidating at first. Once he settled in, he put his nose to the grindstone and worked, worked, worked. He washed pots at one of the school’s five student-run restaurants and attended night classes, a system that gave him a clearer picture of the school’s operations.
After graduation, he took a job at a restaurant in Columbus, then one as a sous-chef in Cleveland — taking home $315 a week for 70 hours of work — then as a corporate chef for a wholesale retail fresh pasta company. He joined the Bon Appétit at Case Western Reserve University, where he met Dave Apthorpe. He left Case Western Reserve for an executive chef position at the University of Akron. He operated his own catering business for five years before joining Bon Appétit at Hillsdale College August 2015.
Seeing so many disparate sides of the business, not just restaurant work, has given him an informed sense of how each part of the food business runs effectively. He also said observing how successful people ran their businesses and adhered to certain mission statements built him up.
“People have no idea all the steps that are taken to get the food to a station in the café — so many steps involved that people don’t see that part of it,” Kander said. “It’s easy for them to judge it because they don’t know what it took to get there.”
But being a self-employed caterer required him to work non-stop, no-vacation.
“I loved it, but I was dying on the inside,” Kander said. He missed family Christmas because a client wanted him to cook for 10 people. He pocketed $1,800 but, he said, it wasn’t worth it.
“You realize what’s important and what’s not,” he said.
Apthorpe said Kander was trying to be a one-man-show.
“But, not knowing where each paycheck was going to come from, he looked to get back into a more stable corporate setting. He believes the values of Hillsdale College, so he thought this would be a really good fit, so far it’s proved just that.”
Kander joined Hillsdale as the catering chef for the Searle Center.
“He was a great fit to open the Searle Center with,” Apthorpe said. “We really wanted to make sure that opening went well, for all the effort the College put into that place.”
When the executive chef of the café position opened, the quality of Kander’s food and the guests’ feedback made him a good fit, since, Apthorpe said, he thought Kander could bring the catering mentality to student dining.
Kander just moved to Chelsea, about 60 miles away, and commutes every day. Like his mom did, he grows a garden at home, with tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and sometimes zucchini, squash, cucumbers, and carrots.
“I keep it simple,” Kander said. “It’s amazing how much of a bounty you get in a small garden.”
The food business hasn’t just taught Kander to appreciate the process what humans eat has to go through to get to their tables. It’s also shaped his life philosophies.
“Half the world’s problems start with hunger,” Kander said. “To me there is no better connection on the planet than food. If the whole world could get together and share a meal we could all get along pretty well.”
